The New Republic’s Campaignfor Marriage Equality

On June 26, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires states to license a marriage between people of the same sex. In other words: Gay marriage is now legal everywhere in America.

It’s become almost a cliché: “It happened so fast!” Indeed, in many respects, the shift has been sudden. Barely three years ago Vice President Joe Biden let slip his support for gay marriage, prompting President Barack Obama to endorse it a few days later. At that time, same-sex marriage was banned in two-thirds of U.S. states; that was still true of a majority of states at this time last year.

But the recent suddeness of marriage equality can not eclipse the hard-fought efforts of this decades-long civil rights struggle. The New Republic, led by the eloquently pugnacious Andrew Sullivan, first put the case for gay marriage on its cover in 1989, and the magazine has been accelerating the debate ever since.